Dinah
Dinah is the seventh child and only daughter of Jacob and Leah.
Shechem asked his father to attain Dinah as a wife for him. At this time in history, it is not unusual for marriages to be arranged in this manner. Here, Hamor is making the arrangements for the marriage between Shechem and Dinah. Jacob will represent his daughter Dinah and suggest an appropriate dowry for Jacob and Leahs’ seventh child and only daughter.
Hamor came to Jacob and asked for Dinah to become Shechem's wife. Shechem had seen her, that she was beautiful and desirable, and now he wanted to marry her. Hamor said, "Make marriages with us; give your daughters to us and take our daughters for yourselves. You shall dwell with us, and the land shall be open to you." Shechem offered Jacob and his sons any bride price they named. However, "the son of Leah and Jacob” answered Shechem and his father Hamor deceitfully because Shechem had defiled their sister Dinah"; they said they would accept the offer if the men of the city agreed to be circumcised (This would certainly be an unusual request for any of us.)
So the men of Shechem were deceived and were circumcised; and "on the third day, when they were sore, two of the sons of Jacob and Leah, Simeon and Levi, Dinah's brothers, took their swords and came upon the city unawares, and killed all the males. They slew Hamor and his son Shechem with the sword, and took Dinah out of Shechem's house, and went away." And the sons of Jacob plundered whatever was in the city and the field, "all their wealth, all their little ones and their wives, all that was in the houses."
"Then Jacob said to Simeon and Levi, 'You have brought trouble and disgrace on me by making me detestable to the inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites and the Perizzites; my numbers are few, and if they gather themselves against me and attack me, I shall be destroyed, both I and my household.' But they said, 'Should he treat our sister as a harlot?'" (Genesis 34:31).
LAST MENTION OF DINAH IN THE BIBLE
When Jacob's family prepares to descend to Egypt, Genesis lists the 70 family members who went down together (Genesis 46:8–27). Dinah is listed explicitly in verse 15 ("These are the sons of Leah, that she bore to Jacob in Padan Aram, and Dinah his daughter."). The Torah does not tell us anything about what happened to her for the remainder of her life, nor if she ever married and raised a family."
GENESIS 34 - 17TH-CENTURY DEPICTION OF THE RAPE OF DINAH.
This portion of the Book of Genesis deals primarily with the family of Abraham and his descendants, including Dinah, her father Jacob, and her brothers. The traditional view is that Moses wrote Genesis and almost all the rest of the Torah, doubtlessly using varied sources but producing them together to give the Hebrews a written history of their ancestors. This view—which has been held for the past several thousand years, although not explicitly mentioned in either the Hebrew or the Christian Bible—holds that Moses included this story primarily because it happened, and he viewed it as significant. It foreshadows later happenings and prophecies further in Genesis and the Torah dealing with the two violent brothers.
Scholars speculate that Genesis combines separate literary elements with different values and concerns and does not pre-date the 1st millennium BC as a unified account. Within Genesis 34 itself, they suggest two layers of narrative: an older account ascribing the killing of Shechem to Simeon and Levi alone and a later addition (verses 27 to 29) involving all the sons of Jacob. Another argues that the narrative combines a *Yahwist narrator describing a rape and an *Elohist speaker describing a seduction.
* The Jahwist, or Yahwist, often abbreviated J, is one of the most widely recognized sources of the Pentateuch (Torah), together with the Deuteronomist, the Priestly source, and the Elohist. The existence of the Jahwist is somewhat controversial, with several scholars, especially in Europe, denying that it ever existed as a coherent independent document. Nevertheless, many scholars do assume its existence. The Jahwist is so named because of its characteristic use of Yahweh for God.
On the other hand, another critical scholar assumes that the earlier authors would not have considered rape to be *defilement in and of itself and posts that the verb describing Dinah as "defiled" was added later (elsewhere in the Bible, only married or betrothed women are "defiled" by rape). He instead says that such a description reflected a "late, post-exilic notion that the idolatrous gentiles are impure [and supports] the prohibition of intermarriage and intercourse with them." Therefore, such a supposed preoccupation with ethnic purity indicates a late date for Genesis in the 5th or 4th centuries BC, when the restored Jewish community in Jerusalem was similarly preoccupied with anti-Samaritan arguments." “Defilement," in the opinion of some, refers to interracial sex rather than rape.
IN RABBINIC LITERATURE
*Midrashic literature contains a series of proposed explanations of the Bible by rabbis. It provides further suggestions on the story of Dinah, suggesting answers to questions such as her offspring: Osnat, a daughter from Shechem, and links to later incidents and characters.
One *midrash states that Dinah was conceived as a male in Leah's womb but miraculously changed to a female, lest the maid-servants (Bilhah and Zilpah) be associated with more of the Israelite tribes than Rachel.
Another *midrash implicates Jacob in Dinah's misfortune. When he met Esau, he locked Dinah in a box for fear that Esau would wish to marry her. However, God rebuked him in these words: "If thou hadst married off thy daughter in time, she would not have been tempted to sin, and might, moreover, have exerted a beneficial influence upon her husband." Her brother Simeon promised to find a husband for her, but she did not wish to leave Shechem, fearing that, after her disgrace, no one would take her to wife. However, she was later married to Job. When she died, Simeon buried her in the land of Canaan. Therefore, she is "the Canaanitish woman" (Gen. 46:10).
*Midrash (noun); Midrashim (plural noun) - an ancient commentary on the Hebrew scriptures, attached to the biblical text. The earliest Midrashim come from the 2nd century AD, although much of their content is older.
Early Christian commentators such as Jerome likewise assign Dinah's responsibility in venturing out to visit the women of Shechem. This story was used to demonstrate the danger to women in the public sphere as contrasted with the relative security of remaining in private.
SIMEON AND LEVI
According to Midrash, Simeon and Levi were only 14 and 13 years old, respectively, at the time of the rape of Dinah. They possessed great moral zealousness (later, in the episode of the Golden Calf, the Tribe of Levi would demonstrate their absolute commitment to Moses' leadership by killing all the people involved in idol worship), but their anger was misdirected here.
One midrash told how Jacob later tried to restrain their hot tempers by dividing their portions in the land of Israel, and neither had lands of their own. Therefore, Dinah's son by Shechem was counted among Simeon's progeny and received a portion of land in Israel. Dinah is "the Canaanite woman" mentioned among those who went down into Egypt with Jacob and his sons (Gen. 46:10). When she died, Simeon buried her in the land of Canaan. (According to another tradition, her child from her rape by Shechem was Asenath, the wife of Joseph, and she later married the prophet Job.
In the Hebrew Bible, the tribe of Levi received a few Cities of Refuge spread out over Israel and relied for their sustenance on the priestly gifts that the Children of Israel gave them.
There were efforts to justify the killing in medieval rabbinic literature, not merely Shechem and Hamor but all the townspeople. Maimonides argued that the killing was understandable because the townspeople had failed to uphold the seventh Noachide law to establish a criminal justice system.
However, Nachmanides disagreed, partly because he viewed the seventh law as a positive commandment that was not punishable by death. Instead, Nachmanides said that the townspeople presumably violated other Noachide laws, such as idolatry or sexual immorality. Later, he argued that Simeon and Levi acted lawfully insofar as they carried out a military operation as an act of vengeance or retribution for the rape of Dinah.
TRAVEL TO EGYPT
The Torah lists the 70 members of Jacob's family who went down together into Egypt (Genesis 46:8–27). Simeon's children include "Shaul the son of a Canaanitish woman." (verse 10) The medieval French rabbi Rashi hypothesized that this Shaul was Dinah's son by Shechem. He suggests that after the brothers killed all the men in the city, including Shechem and his father, Dinah refused to leave the palace unless Simeon agreed to marry her and remove her shame (according to Nachmanides, she only lived in his house and did not have sex with him). Therefore, Shaul is counted among Simeon's progeny, and he received a portion of land in Israel in the time of Joshua. The list of the names of the families of Israel in Egypt is repeated in Exodus 6:14–25 (including "Shaul the son of a Canaanitish woman," verse 15).
